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Homes as “free space”
The Study
The traditional Korean hanok as a smart solution for today's housing problems
From Hanok to Today’s Apartment How Standardized South Korean Homes Provide Residents a Free Hand Andrea Prins
At first sight, their massiveness is most outstanding: Korean apartment blocks. Their white-gray silhouettes loom everywhere, in urban areas [Fig. 1] and also close to the beautifully wooded mountainsides. It is easy to despise those blocks as repetitive ugliness. However, the apartments are extremely popular. Having lived in the flats myself, I discovered why: they are not only rooted in centuries-old housing traditions but also offer smart solutions for today’s cohabitation – in South Korea and far beyond.
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bed covered with a bright blue spread, a mirror, a closet, some chairs on a wooden-like floor: my home for the coming weeks. Behind the sliding window, the evening sun colors the nearly identical neighboring apartment blocks pale orange. “Normally, this room is my mother’s pied-à-terre,” explains my host Yeon-Ho Choi, a young man in his twenties employed by the multinational Lotte Corporation. My room’s annex bathroom is near the entrance. In addition, the flat consists of my host’s bedroom, his studio, and a second bathroom. Situated between “my” and his rooms is the living area. The surrounding Hanam district – with its 255,000 inhabitants – is brand new. Sales were frantic: downtown Seoul is only 60 minutes away by subway. The apartment itself is anything but special. But that’s exactly why I’m here. In the summer of 2019, I lived with different hosts in Greater Seoul to study those flats, and I spoke with residents and architects about housing habits. What makes these repetitive flats so popular?
the traditional, seemingly unpretentious houses made of wood, clay, paper, straw, and tiles. This article does not discuss their sophisticated heating system and their perfect climate adaptation,1 but instead concentrates on floor plans. As a building type, hanoks appeared during the in the late fourteenth century on the Korean peninsula.2
Unless inhabited by the noble class, hanoks had but few, relatively small rooms. The open, south-oriented daecheong maru – “hall with wooden floor” – is a collectively used living space [Fig. 2]. In winter, wooden panels hung in front of the opening to convert the open hall into an interior space. Intimate rooms are located on both sides of
Hanoks: more than a romantic tradition Two years earlier, my partner and I traveled through South Korea. Call it a professional deformation, but I can’t resist looking at architecture, even in holidays. So all over the country we visited hanoks,
Fig. 2: Schematized floor plan of a typical hanok: two intimate rooms on both sides of the living area, and photos showing the exterior and the “hall with wooden floor” (Images by the author, 2021).
Fig. 1: Room with a view: residential buildings seen from “my” home in Hanam. In the foreground, the park zone meandering through the neighborhood towards the left side for kilometers (Image by the author, 2019).
the daecheong maru. Hanoks only recently experienced a revival, not only as residential homes, but also as restaurants, offices, and guesthouses. My real discovery occurred near the construction site for a typical, large-scale housing project. Billboards usually show renderings of people happily lounging in their perfect home, but this time floor plans were presented. The eye-opener: the flats-to-be had a centrally located living area with smaller rooms on either side, just like the hanoks. So the traditional spatial structure of the hanoks seems to be vivid in today's serial mass housing.
The Apartments Republic The rebuilding of the capital, once destroyed in the Korean War, was followed by a period of rapid urban extension. Since 1970, one type of serial mass housing predominates: elongated in form and 15 to 20 stories high.3 From conversations with residents and Korean architects,4 I understood that there are many reasons for the ongoing popularity of the mass housing blocks. The government provides excellent schools and stores nearby, and even suburbs located far from the city center are conveniently accessible by (public) transport. Following the successful regeneration of the Cheonggyecheon